Google Singapore has unveiled its list of top search terms used by Singaporeans in its annual Zeitgeist that offers a glimpse of the year’s major trends and events.

Topping the list of personalities were Tin Pei Ling, Nicole Seah and George Yeo, underscoring the nation’s interest in the watershed General Election 2011. Searches on the elections also figured prominently in this year’s top news searches. …

Google will retire its Wave collaboration platform for good next year in an “off-season spring cleaning” exercise.

In a e-mail to Google Wave users yesterday, the search giant said all waves will be read-only by January 31, 2012, followed by a complete shut-down of the service on April 30, 2012. Users can continue to export individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. …

Twitter may already possess a large portion of the pie serving up bite-sized pieces of information, but a bunch of developers based in Singapore is taking square aim at the micro-blogging service with a location-based twist.

Like Twitter, the app lets users feature – or feecha – an event or an object that’s close to him/her, which friends of that user can discover. Unlike Twitter, however, these feechas are all visualised on a map, and are colour-coded based on popularity.

It is currently possible to add your location to a tweet, but Twitter treats that as a secondary and optional feature. Feecha seeks to highlight that very feature and make it central to the app’s experience. …

Singaporeans are a well-connected socially networked lot.

When Straits Times first broke the news of the bee attack at Ngee Ann Poly yesterday, with 35 students and three staff stung and taken to various hospitals, I thought the story would be big and that there were going to be interesting reactions in our social media space.

So the kaypoh in me decided to run JamiQ, a social media software monitoring tool, to track the incident.

It didn’t turn out to be such a big story, but “Ngee Ann Poly” did manage to trend yesterday in twitter. The data, to a data geek like me, was interesting. Data from JamiQ showed up almost 250+ tweets on this topic since yesterday afternoon to today.

The biggest spikes were around 2pm, when the news broke on ST Straits Times, and initially consisted of retweets of the breaking news, queries on the safety of friends and family, and questions on whether this was why classes were shutdown at the Ngee Ann Polytechnic campus yesterday.

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Google has launched a dedicated YouTube site for Singapore in a bid to grow its inventory of localized video content. Prior to this, the search giant has been offering localized YouTube services in 34 other countries including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, India and more recently, the Philippines.

Users can visit the localized site by choosing “Singapore” as the location setting at the bottom of the YouTube.com homepage, or by heading directly to youtube.com.sg. …

In the past, I was never been very much sold on social media for the enterprise.

Don’t get me wrong. Social media is a big game changer in sharing and disseminating information quickly.

From the Arab Spring, to our recent Singapore General Elections, to the Occupy Wall Street protests — in its fourth week and showing no signs of slowing down, social media is a force to reckon with.

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What if we could predict the future?

TIBCO’s CEO Vivek Ranadivé believes that we can.

Speaking at TUCON 2011, which is the annual customer event that software infrastructure player TIBCO runs every year in Las Vegas, Vivek explained that the key to crystal-ball gazing was access to the right information.

“The right information at the right time is worth more than all the information in the world,” he said during his keynote this week.

He called this the “two-second advantage”, which also happens to be the title of his new book (co-authored with journalist Kevin Maney) that was just published a few weeks ago.

In his book, the two-second advantage refers to the flash of insight that talented people use to guide their decisions.
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Going on the Internet is so important to its wired Gen Y users today that they rate it as something as essential and basic as air, food, water and shelter, according to a report released late last week.

A third of a group of about 2,800 youths told a survey conducted by networking vendor Cisco earlier this year that they considered the Internet as important as some of the most basic needs for survival. More than half of them said they could not live without the Internet, citing it as something that was “integral” to their everyday lives. …

Salesforce.com is deepening the social connections that underpin its suite of cloud computing products.

Starting this October, its customer relationship management (CRM) customers will be able to see social profiles of customers with data mined from social networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn.

Chatter, Salesforce’s enterprise social networking tool available for almost two years now, will also support instant messaging for the first time.

This means Chatter users will soon be able to chat with fellow workers, share screens, collaborate with partners and approve requests directly from their Chatter feeds. …

Cook a pot of curry day may have ended yesterday, but the viral meme is still going strong.

It has definitely weighed more heavily on Singaporean minds than our upcoming presidential elections this coming Saturday 27th August, if social media — Facebook Likes and YouTube views — is any indication.

Originally organized as a fun way to spread the “message of tolerance” in Singapore’s multi-racial culture, the cooking protest on Facebook has gone viral globally, with global newswires like Reuters and Bloomberg covering the story.

It all started when a new migrant Chinese family complained about the smell of curry and pressured their Indian neighbours to stop cooking it. When this story came out in our mainstream press two weeks ago, Singaporeans came up with creative ways to sing about, yes, curry.

Here are some of the best parodies and original songs on YouTube on this issue that will make you smile. May you always enjoy and share your curry with others!

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